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Shirred Eggs with Crumbs
Oil each shirred egg dish or ramekin with Mazola and dust with coarse bread crumbs. Break an egg into a saucer, gently slide it into the shirring dish, dust with salt, pepper and crumbs, pour one-half teaspoon Mazola over and bake in a moderate oven about ten minutes.
A one-egg dish that lives or dies on oven timing. Everything else is preparation.
- Moderate ovenIn period usage this is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat ten minutes should give a just-set white with a fluid yolk in a shallow china dish; a heavier stoneware ramekin will likely need a few minutes more.
- Carryover cookingThe dish keeps cooking after it leaves the oven. Pull the eggs when the whites are barely opaque and a little wobbly at the centre, not when they look finished.
- Shirring dishA shirred egg dish is a shallow individual gratin or egg dish, wider than it is deep, so the white spreads thin and cooks evenly. A tall straight-sided ramekin insulates the base and slows the white while the top overcooks.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. The brand is named at every turn, which points to a cookbook issued to promote it. Any neutral oil works, and melted butter gives a better flavour with crumbs.
- Coarse bread crumbsTorn stale bread crumbs, not the fine sandy commercial kind. Coarse crumbs toast into a crust in the oil; fine crumbs turn to paste against the egg white.
- Breaking into a saucer firstWorth keeping. It lets you catch a broken yolk or a bad egg before it hits the prepared dish, and it lets the egg slide in whole rather than dropping and spreading.
- YieldOne egg per dish. Serve in the dish it was baked in, set on a plate.
This is a promotional cookbook: Mazola is named in almost every line because the Corn Products Refining Company published books like this to teach American cooks what to do with corn oil, a relatively new refined product in the early twentieth century, in kitchens that had always reached for butter or lard. The dish itself is much older than the oil. Shirred eggs are the English name for what French cookery calls oeufs sur le plat, eggs baked and served in the same small shallow dish; the origin of the word "shirr" is unsettled, and the various explanations offered for it, including a link to the sense of gathering or puckering fabric, remain folk tradition rather than established fact. Crumbs were a common American refinement, giving a hotel breakfast a browned top and a little texture against an otherwise plain baked egg.